Petrobras scandal

Petrobras scandal, Brazilian political corruption scandal beginning in 2014 that involved the indictment of dozens of high-level businesspeople and politicians as part of a widespread investigation alleging that many millions of dollars had been kicked back to officials of Petrobras, Brazil’s huge majority-state-owned oil company, and to politicians—especially members of the ruling Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores; PT) of Pres. Dilma Rousseff—by prominent Brazilian corporations in return for contracts with Petrobras.

The malfeasance was revealed by a federal investigation begun in 2014 under the code name Lava Jato (“Car Wash”). The massive scheme to defraud Petrobras—Brazil’s largest enterprise and a symbol of the country’s entrenched economic nationalism—did not fully come to light, however, until after the narrow reelection of President Rousseff on October 26, 2014. By the time of her second inauguration, on January 1, 2015, Rousseff’s approval rating had collapsed to 14 percent, with some two-thirds of Brazilians blaming her for Petrobras’s troubles.

Dubbed “Petrolão”—after mensalão (“big monthly bribe”), the vote-buying scandal that had plagued the government of Rousseff’s predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (better known simply as “Lula”)—the episode came to be viewed as the largest corruption scandal in Brazilian history. By June 2015 a massive scheme to defraud Petrobras on contracts to develop the so-called pre-salt oil reserves found offshore in 2007 had appeared on investigators’ radar. Moreover, reports suggested that federal prosecutors were also looking into the electricity-generating sector, pension funds for employees of state-owned companies, and the National Bank of Economic and Social Development (BNDES). The latter had provided billions of dollars in subsidized financing to Petrobras and other “national champions,” such as billionaire Eike Batista, whose wealth plummeted spectacularly in 2013.

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Given Petrobras’s size and the breadth of its reach in the country’s economy, Samuel Pessoa, a leading economist, projected that the company’s woes would reduce Brazil’s GDP by 0.75 percent in 2015. In the event, the faltering Brazilian economy not only plunged into recession but also became mired in an economic crisis that, according to some sources, was the worst Brazil had experienced since 1901, with inflation climbing. A deepening crisis of confidence coalesced around the perception of macroeconomic mismanagement by the Rousseff administration during its first term.

Millions of Brazilians responded to opposition calls to mark the 30th anniversary of the reinstatement of democracy, on March 15, 2015, with a day of street protests. By July—with her popularity reduced to single digits in opinion polls—Rousseff found it necessary to state in an interview with the daily newspaper Folha de São Paulo that she would not resign from the presidency and would fight “tooth and nail” any attempts to remove her from office. A former technocrat with limited political skills but a reputation for personal honesty that was recognized even by her adversaries, the president was reportedly livid at allegations of her involvement in the scandal. “I will not pay for somebody else’s crap,” a furious Rousseff reportedly told advisers before departing for an official visit to the United States on June 28, according to information leaked to Folha de São Paulo and not denied by the president’s press office. In early December the heat was turned up on Rousseff, who became the target of impeachment proceedings not because of any alleged involvement in the scandal but on charges that she had improperly employed funds from state banks to mask budget shortfalls.

Testimony given under plea-bargain agreements by several individuals implicated in the Petrobras scandal, including two former senior managers of the company and the CEO of one of the implicated construction companies, exposed a cartel-like criminal conspiracy set up and run from within the company after 2003, during a period when Rousseff chaired the company’s board of directors as minister of mines and energy and chief of staff of the Lula administration. For more than a decade, Petrobras’s managers allegedly had acted with senior executives of firms that supplied goods and services to Petrobras (including Brazil’s largest construction companies) to inflate prices of Petrobras contracts in an effort to skim as much as 3 percent off each contract on a prearranged rotating basis. Some $2.1 billion was allegedly redistributed in this manner for the personal gain of the scheme’s operators and to finance campaigns of dozens of politicians, mostly from the PT and its partners in the government coalition, most notably the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB). Pedro Barusco, a third-tier executive who reported to Renato Duque, Petrobras’s director for engineering and services, agreed to return $100 million he had stolen from the company and deposited in foreign bank accounts. The company’s former director of refining and supply, Paulo Roberto Costa, confessed to having received bribes and agreed to pay back $23 million.

More than 30 individuals were arrested in operations carried out nationally by federal police starting in mid-November 2014. The accused were taken to a detention centre in Curitiba, the southern city in which the federal judge Sérgio Fernando Moro presided over the case. Among those directly implicated were the CEOs of the major construction companies OAS, Queiroz Galvão, and UTC, along with senior executives of the construction firms Camargo Corrêa and Engevix, as well as senior executives of the oil firm IESA. On June 19, 2015, the CEOs of two of Brazil’s largest construction companies, Marcelo Odebrecht (of the Odebrecht Group) and Otávio Marques de Azevedo (of Andrade Gutierrez S.A.), were arrested under Judge Moro’s orders. In July the CEO of Camargo Corrêa, Dalton dos Santos Avancini, along with the company’s chairman and a senior executive, was convicted of money laundering, corruption, and other charges related to the scandal. The most prominent businessperson to be ensnared in the scandal was André Santos Esteves, the CEO of the Brazilian investment bank BTG Pactual, who was arrested on November 25.

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Also arrested that day was Sen. Delcídio do Amaral of the PT, an important ally of Rousseff, who became the first sitting senator to be arrested since at least the 1980s. Amaral and Esteves were accused of obstructing the scandal investigation by attempting to pressure a former Petrobras executive not to accept a plea-bargain agreement and cooperate with investigators. By that point more than 50 members and former members of Congress had been targeted by prosecutors in criminal investigations—among them the president of the Senate, Renan Calheiros; the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of Brazil’s legislature), Eduardo Cunha; and Lula’s former minister of finance, Antonio Palocci, who served briefly as Rousseff’s chief of staff before being ousted in a separate lobbying scandal. Also targeted were the former minister of mines and energy in Rousseff’s first term, Edison Lobão, a protégé of former president José Sarney, and former president Fernando Collor de Mello, who had returned as a senator from Alagoas a decade after his 1992 impeachment as president on corruption charges, of which he was later cleared by the Supreme Court.

By March 2015 federal prosecutors had formally accused 110 people of corruption, money laundering, and other financial crimes. In April Petrobras’s newly appointed management team, including new CEO Aldemir Bendine, announced that the company had lost $17 billion to mismanagement and graft. They also said that Petrobras would have to sell almost the same amount in assets and postpone investment plans to regain its financial footing. Moreover, Petrobras’s market value had been reduced by half, and the company was burdened by a $100 billion debt. In the meantime, class-action suits brought against Petrobras by investors and investigations opened by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the U.S. Department of Justice under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (1977) added to the pressure the scandal generated for improving Brazil’s corporate governance.

In August 2015 José Dirceu, who had served as chief of staff for Lula from 2003 to 2005, was arrested as the tentacles of the scandal reached toward the highest levels of elected office in Brazil. Already convicted of involvement in the mensalão affair, Dirceu had spent 18 months in prison and was serving the remainder of his 10-year-plus sentence under house arrest. By early 2016 Lula himself was ensnared in the investigation.

On March 4, 2016, Lula’s home was raided by police, who then brought the former president in for some three hours of questioning. He was formally charged with money laundering roughly a week later for allegedly having hidden his ownership of a seaside luxury apartment that reputedly had come into his possession as a result of his ties to a construction firm. Lula denied ownership of the apartment. With public outrage mounting, Rousseff named him her chief of staff, ostensibly to employ Lula’s still-wide political influence to help her navigate the dangerous shoals of the economic crisis. Before that could happen, a federal judge both blocked Lula’s appointment and released a wiretapped phone conversation between Rousseff and Lula, which arguably indicated that Rousseff had made the appointment to protect Lula from prosecution. As a cabinet member, Lula would be legally exempt from federal prosecution and could be tried only in the Supreme Court. Against that backdrop, calls for Rousseff’s impeachment swelled in the halls of government and on the streets: on March 13, according to some estimates, more than a million Brazilians across the country joined protests calling for Rousseff’s resignation or removal.

On March 29 the PMDB, the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies, withdrew from the government’s ruling coalition. Despite having been charged with corruption and money laundering himself, the PMDB’s Cunha had become one of the most forceful advocates of Rousseff’s impeachment on grounds related to her government’s allegedly unethical accounting practices. On April 11 a 65-member congressional committee voted 38–27 to recommend moving forward with impeachment proceedings. The next day another of the partners in the PT’s ruling coalition, the Progressive Party, pulled out of the government, increasing the possibility that the two-thirds majority vote in the Chamber of Deputies necessary to send Rousseff to the Senate for trial could be achieved. In the event, on the evening of April 17, following three days of impassioned debate, the 513-seat Chamber of Deputies voted to proceed with the impeachment process as 367 deputies voted for impeachment (considerably more than the 342 votes required).

As the Senate prepared to vote on whether to try Rousseff, a new wrinkle appeared in the story. In the first week of May, the Supreme Court ordered that Cunha be removed as speaker for allegedly having obstructed the investigation into corruption charges against him. On May 9 his replacement as speaker, Waldir Maranhão (who was also a target of the Lava Jato investigation) annulled the April 17 vote, saying that irregularities had occurred during the session in which the vote was taken. A day later, responding to senators’ assertions that they would proceed with their vote anyway, Maranhão reversed his decision. Meanwhile, an appeal to the Supreme Court by Rousseff to halt the impeachment proceedings was unsuccessful.

After an all-night debate, early in the morning of May 12, the Senate voted 55 to 22 to suspend Rousseff and to consider impeachment. Vice Pres. Michel Temer of the PMDB, a former ally of Rousseff, became acting president. In the event of Rousseff’s conviction, Temer would serve the remainder of her term, ending in 2018. Temer himself had been convicted of violating campaign finance limits and faced the possibility of being prohibited from running for office in the next election.

Temer’s interim administration suffered a bruising blow less than two weeks after taking office when Romero Juca, the new planning minister and a close confidant of the acting president, was forced to step down amid accusations that he had sought to obstruct the Operation Car Wash investigation. A newspaper released a taped conversation between Juca and an ex-senator under investigation in the scandal in which Juca said, “The government has to be changed in order to stop this bleeding.” Juca claimed that he was referring to the need to replace Rousseff in order to resurrect the economy; critics alleged that he was proposing to make Rousseff a scapegoat for the scandal.

On August 10 the Senate voted 59 to 21 to hold an impeachment trial of Rousseff, at the end of which a two-thirds majority vote would be necessary for conviction and permanent removal from office. That trial began on August 25. When she appeared before the Senate on August 29, Rousseff claimed again that in shifting state funds she had done nothing that previous presidents had not already done, and she argued that the attempt to force her from the presidency had really come about because she had allowed the Operation Car Wash investigation to proceed and expand. Nevertheless, on August 31 the Senate voted 61–20 to convict Rousseff and permanently remove her from office. Temer prepared to serve the remainder of Rousseff’s term, which was scheduled to last until January 2019.

Some two weeks later, on September 13, the lower house voted to expel Rousseff’s nemesis Cunha for perjury, corruption, and obstruction of justice, thus eliminating his immunity from criminal prosecution and opening the possibility that he too could be charged in the Operation Car Wash investigation. Cunha would later be tried, convicted of corruption, money laundering, and illegally sending money abroad, and sentenced to more than 15 years in prison.

In an even more dramatic development, on September 20, Sérgio Moro, the judge overseeing the investigation, formally ordered Lula, his wife, and six others to stand trial. Lula, who was charged with having accepted bribes worth about $1.1 million and has been called the mastermind of the scandal, once again protested his innocence, claiming that the charges were intended to prevent him from running for president in 2018.

In January 2017 Lula’s wife suffered a stroke. She died in early February. In May 2017 the trial involving the seaside luxury apartment (dubbed Brazil’s “trial of the century”) began with Lula making a five-hour deposition before Judge Moro. In July Lula was convicted of corruption and money laundering. He received a sentence of nearly 10 years in prison.

In the meantime, Temer’s grasp on power became increasingly tenuous as he became the target of new accusations of corruption related to the scandal. In May 2017 a secretly recorded tape surfaced of a conversation between Temer and Joesley Batista, the plea-bargaining chairman of a large meatpacking company. In that conversation Temer appeared to approve of the offer of hush money to Cunha. Later Batista would testify that Temer had received millions of dollars in bribes. Threatened with impeachment, Temer denied the accusations and refused to resign. In late June he was officially charged with corruption, but, before he could be tried, two-thirds of the Chamber of Deputies would have to vote to suspend him from office to stand trial. When the deputies voted on August 2, 2017, only 227 of 513 voted to try Temer—well short of the 342 votes required.

While Temer’s public-approval ratings were dismal as the October 2018 presidential election approached, opinion polling showed Lula to be the leading candidate for the country’s highest office. Lula’s ability to run, however, hinged on the ruling of an appellate court in Porto Allegre on his conviction. The Clean Record law passed in 2010 during Lula’s presidency banned convicted criminals from running for public office. On January 24, 2018, the three-judge panel not only unanimously upheld Lula’s conviction but also increased his sentence to more than 12 years. Nevertheless, Lula still had the option of appealing that ruling to the Supreme Court, and there was speculation that he would also appeal the prohibition on his candidacy.

On April 5, 2018, the Supreme Court denied a request from Lula that he be permitted to remain free while he pursued his final appeal options. Instead of turning himself in the next day to begin serving his prison sentence as he had been ordered to do, Lula took refuge for two days outside São Paulo in the headquarters of the union where he had begun his political career. On April 7, however, after delivering an impassioned speech in which he once again protested his innocence and claimed that his prosecution and conviction had been politically motivated, Lula gave himself up to begin serving his sentence.

In March 2021 a Supreme Court judge ruled that Lula should never have been tried for corruption in Curitiba and dismissed the charges against him. Although that ruling remained subject to appeal to the full Supreme Court, and three other cases against Lula were still being conducted in Brasília, the decision meant that Lula was once again eligible to run for public office. In July 2022, he became the Workers’ Party’s official candidate in the 2022 presidential election.